ServiceNow Channel Chief Wants To Build ‘An AI-Led Partner Ecosystem’

‘When I think about the channel ecosystem, I don’t think there’s any ecosystem that’s ever going to be asked to move as fast as we’re going to have to move to be ready for the opportunity,’ ServiceNow Channel Chief Michael Park tells CRN.

A simpler partner program, partners helping ServiceNow establish a reputation outside its classic IT tool use cases and speeding up customers’ time-to-value are part of the goals ServiceNow channel chief Michael Park has for himself and the vendor’s solution providers.

His goal is to transform the ServiceNow channel to “create a vibrant AI-led ecosystem and really be the company and be the organization that writes the playbook on what does it really mean to be an AI-led partner ecosystem,” Park told CRN in an interview.

Park, whose official title is senior vice president of global partnerships and channels, said that he has consolidated the partner leadership team, established greater accountability for field teams and ServiceNow global functions, and better aligned the company’s incentive structure to bring ServiceNow closer to its partners.

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ServiceNow Channel Chief Park

Park took over the channel chief role in May, succeeding Erica Volini. ServiceNow has about 2,200 channel partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.

Gary Plotkin, partner at ServiceNow solution provider KPMG U.S., told CRN in an interview that ServiceNow has complemented the consulting giant’s practices with other vendors including Microsoft and Oracle.

Plotkin and his team have been moving customers beyond ServiceNow’s classic IT capabilities and into use cases in risk, cybersecurity and human resources.

“We’re really moving into the middle and front office in terms of industry-specific capabilities,” he said.

Here’s more of what Park told CRN about his earliest days as channel chief and what the future holds for ServiceNow partners.

What should partners know about your early days as channel chief?

I’ve been doing a listening tour on virtually every continent now. I’ve met 130 partners.

The last job I was in I formed, built, created and ran and scaled up AI go-to-market for the company. So we were able to really think about how do we move a SaaS business model to more AI speed, which is doubling a product set every 60 to 90 days.

In the market in the last year, we went from ChatGPT to generative AI to agentic AI now to A2A protocol [Google’s Agent2Agent protocol that aims to allow AI agents to communicate with each other]. It’s just changing so fast.

We are literally on the precipice of an entirely new ecosystem that’s going to be created in what I think will be one-fifth the time of the way cloud emerged.

Cloud took like seven, eight years to really materialize. And the speed at which we’re moving is just crazy—in a good way. But it forces us to really challenge the status quo.

When I think about the channel ecosystem, I don’t think there’s any ecosystem that’s ever going to be asked to move as fast as we’re going to have to move to be ready for the opportunity. There’s upside in terms of the new jobs that will be created; there’s downside in the disruption that will come through the disintermediation of labor with AI.

There [are] all kinds of new ways to stitch technology layers, stacks and departments and systems together in a much faster way for a higher value-add. What we really want to do for the next couple of years here is set a clear operating model.

We have five distinct routes to market, and across those routes to market we want partners to choose where their DNA is best suited across those five markets. Because what we’re going to do in those routes is we’re going to create clear goals, training, incentives, offers, programs so that partners who choose a particular route to market—and you could choose one, you could choose all five if you’re big.

That’s the anchor point for how we’re both going to double down and try to try to grow business and accelerate together. And if I can do that with absolute clarity as a representation of ServiceNow’s offerings, use communication with high frequency and measurement and rewards to keep the partner channels performing with us against that route or routes, I can transform a channel and create a vibrant AI-led ecosystem and really be the company and be the organization that writes the playbook on what does it really mean to be an AI-led partner ecosystem.

What have you learned from partners in your travels?

There’s a need for guidance on how to use AI in a way that it can deliver value. There are a lot of projects that are failing right now. And for many different reasons. Lack of sponsorship, lack of definition of what success looks like. Synthetic production of data to make a demo look good that, when it goes into production with real data, doesn’t work. There’s all kinds of governance, trust, change management.

Looking at each route to market—we have consulting and implementation, which is your traditional, project-led, deploy software [route]. That’s going to be affected by AI.

Managed services—which is IT outsourcing, application management, business process outsourcing—that’s going to be affected by AI.

Reselling is going to be really important. We’ve all always resold in the industry as a product, transactional engine. But the opportunity with AI now will enable us to very easily package an AI-led solution out of the box and use resell to access new geographies, to access new market segments that we don’t traditionally sell with our direct model in a much faster way.

And then we’ve got the build partners—who are all of our strategic partners that are going to be building as ISVs, building as AI agents—that is going to represent a new way of thinking about how we deliver an application.

[It] may not be an application … that you actually type on. Modality could be voice or camera. And then there are the hyperscalers who for us [are] a distribution access point for how to leverage their platforms in their marketplaces to deliver our IP, deliver that innovation with greater reach on chosen platforms that are already committed with burn downs that have to be delivered over the next few years.

We’ll have some partners that are like, ‘I’m really good at consulting implementation.’ Great. We’re going to teach you, using the ServiceNow platform, how to take the AI journey and do really well on our platform.

With each subsequent route to market, we’re playing the same game and saying, ‘How can that single platform, single data model, single architecture, which has embedded AI native sitting side by side with a stateful workflow, be put to use to help create new business value faster for the customer based on the unique skill set of what the channel skills are in the market, combined with the technology we bring, and the enablement we bring?’

And then it’s being clear on how we measure that. It’s being clear on how we work with our partners on that to engage with the customer. And then it’ s how do we create the easy button and consistency in the way we administer that so, over time, the partners with higher frequency on a shorter compression of time learn how to operate that model with the greatest leverage possible?

Speed is of the essence. We don’t have years to wait.

How is AI changing things for ServiceNow and its partners?

We were in a meeting with a big partner … one of the things that partner was saying was, ‘When we upgrade the legacy stuff, it takes three to five years to upgrade this type of ERP or CRM [software].’

And we’re like, ‘Guys, the upgrade of the ServiceNow instance takes a day, maybe a week.’ And that’s without the AI. Now, when we bring AI in, think about the speed at which you’re going to be able to move to transform the way a business can operate and leverage the platform to drive change.

That’s really what it comes down to. Putting in place all the tools … and the clarity and the easy button through our channel programs to help partners get the maximum leverage from the technology in a way that they can deliver it at speed to a customer. And then it’s being consistent in how we administer the organization with a partner to hook into our sales motion, our go-to-market, our services so that the one plus one equals three, and how we attack and penetrate this giant TAM [total addressable market], which is no longer just an IT help desk.

We compete in all corners of the enterprise, at the largest enterprise segment down into other segments. And we’re now expanding into many geos.

I’m going around the world and, of course, AI and data is top of the pyramid in terms of the discussion. But how that particular partner ecosystem is emerging to deliver value in an accelerated way—that’s different in every market. Which is why we need to have partners, but it’s also why we need to have a super strong program that can teach partners how they use their local market knowledge using the power of our platform.

What’s the advice to partners in navigating all of this action?

Based on what you as a customer are doing, what you want to do and what industry you’re in and what geographies you play in and what segment you’re in, what do you want to accomplish with the technology?

If you’re in a commodity industry [for example], you’re going to be looking for cost-structure takeout.

You’re going to want to have some kind of technology capability that can rapidly respond to cost fluctuations around the world. Because in a commodity business, the price is relatively fixed. So the platform strategies—you have got to span multiple systems, very quickly respond to cost structure changes, supply chain changes.

Your revenue structure is relatively fixed. So it’s about expansion, geo expansion or segment expansion. And then the question is if those are the guiding principles of the business, then how is the technology platform best designed to match it? Can a rigid ERP system that’s designed to do something really well repeatedly serve the need? Or not? It’s not like you can just discard ERP.

At least for ServiceNow, the discussion is how do we help modernize ERP? Not by taking it out, but by having it interoperate with ServiceNow so that we can create workflow agility around the investment that’s already been made.

If you’re in telco … or you’re in the tech industry, or you’re B2C [business-to-consumer], that’s changing fast. There’s no real legacy there when you’re building on a new technology.

Retailers want to redefine the experience when you walk into a store and have that be consistent with how you’re shopping online. That has a whole different set of capabilities from a platform strategy standpoint.

You first have to meet the customer where they are in terms of what they’re trying to do. Then you have to understand what they have. And then from that gap, you can start to advise how to use new technologies to bridge it. And the beauty of ServiceNow is we’ve been doing workflow automation for years. We just were stuck inside IT. Now we’re playing it everywhere.

The opportunity for the partner is to imagine the art of the possible with a stateful workflow that’s got embedded AI.

So many big companies in tech don’t have the capability because they just bolted on the AI.

We integrated it natively into the platform. So it’s single platform, single architecture.

If you stand up a ServiceNow center of excellence, you need one team. You need a UX [user experience] expert, you need a tooling expert, and you need a data expert. But whether you’re doing global shared services, CRM, supply chain, IT, HR, it’s the exact same platform, exact same skill set, one time, applied everywhere.

Whereas some of these other guys, because when they were growing, they had to acquire to keep the growth up. When you lift the hood, every single app is a different architecture that you have to then integrate into a world of AI, which is time-consuming and slow and rigid.

How have you changed things as channel chief?

In the last 100 days, I have consolidated the leadership team. Cut it in half. I have removed spans of control. I have clarified the accountability of what global functions do versus field because the action happens in the field, in the day-to-day execution.

But you need the global resources to manage global partners, to do strategy, to integrate programs and incentives and offers and connect all the dots before it reaches the geo so that the geo can execute without having to go stitch it all together.

I have created a single operating score card of 10 metrics. That is how we’re going to drive the entire function. I’m going to be really transparent with a channel about what we measure. That will be cut by each of the five routes to market. So the channel [partner] gets to choose which ones they want to play in.

And I’ve aligned the incentive structure to that, not just of the channel, but how we’re actually paying our own people. And I’ve consolidated the roles of the people from many, many different roles down to essentially three roles—partner manager, partner seller, partner business developer.

It’s designed to simplify how we operate, to make it easier for the partner to operate with us.

We’re doubling the AI footprint of the company every 90 days. So if I don’t get the day-to-day operating routine simplified and autonomous in a way that it just works, there’s not going to be enough time and room to absorb the R&D that we have coming into the market.

I have got to hit the easy button on training partners on how to receive [new ServiceNow capabilities], how to translate and how to convert that into money and services so that that doesn’t slow down the innovation cycle that’s coming every 60 to 90 days. That’s the real deal.

Everyone’s talking about AI. If you don’t know how to cut through the noise, everything sounds the same and everything’s super confusing.

What we need to do is focus on real use cases that are solving real-world problems on the strengths of what our platform can do, which is honoring the past and bringing forward that strength into a new world with an even stronger technology.

Do you want to see the ServiceNow ecosystem grow in partner number?

We’re only a $13 billion company today. When you add our remaining performance obligation, which is the future commitments that we’ve sold, that’s another $13 billion.

Three years from now, if we do our job right, we should be around a $25 [billion] to $30 billion company.

It’s about increasing value per partner, but it’s also about increasing the number of partners. And that’s going to come on two dimensions—segment expansion and geo expansion. And then across both of those, it will be industry differentiation.

We’re growing in revenue faster than we’re building deployment capability.

With agentic AI coming in, which will automate a lot of traditional implementation work, there’s still going to be a huge demand for a head count that can do the data integration work, that can integrate the LLMs, that can configure the agents, that can deliver the user experience—multimodal [even], beyond just the app, into voice and into other modalities of how an application runs, all powered from the ServiceNow platform.

What I see going forward isn’t about being afraid. It’s about can you run fast enough with ServiceNow to capture the size of the opportunity that’s in front of us?

There are a lot of hypotheticals on the future of enterprise applications in the AI era—why should customers and partners invest in ServiceNow if they could potentially build better custom offers in the future?

There’s always going to be some combination of build and compose, leveraging a packaged app or going to a managed service model.

It looks like a bell curve. There’s a little bit on the right and a little bit on the left and a lot in the middle.

The customer needs to spend time understanding how AI is going to affect their business and then, based on that, they should choose the right approach.

If you’re a giant multinational and you’re going to drive global business services—which is the central administration of shared services across IT, HR, procurement—for hundreds of thousands of employees, that’s likely going to be a managed service on the right side.

But if you’re on the ServiceNow platform with that, the AI will basically be doing most of the service for you. That’s an interesting use case in the large enterprise. That’s a cost-takeout play where you can start with ServiceNow today, even without the AI, and deliver that.

And then as the technology advances, you just take more and more of the benefit of AI and the cost structure goes down and down and down and down.

In another sense, you might have not invested properly in IT over the many, many years.

You can literally use the ServiceNow platform to take out costs and consolidate the complexity of IT management because that’s what we do. And that’s project-driven work or it can be a managed service.

In either of those cases, I haven’t created IP and AI that’s unique to that company. When I’m building and composing, I may not want to use ServiceNow because it’s a repeatable platform. I may want to build something completely custom out on a line of business either because there’s no app that can solve that problem or what I build is so unique I don’t want anybody else knowing about it.

There are different platforms that can solve [problems] in different ways. We’re very good in the middle and on the right. And then on the left, which is the custom configure and compose, that’s when you’re using LangChain and Anthropic and Palantir and other things to build custom capability that’s unique, but it doesn’t scale well, it doesn’t upgrade well. Once it’s in, it’s in, and it’s very expensive, so you have got to be thoughtful about how and when you’re going to use that.

What’s ServiceNow’s biggest challenge today?

We have a perception issue because we’re still coming out of IT, and a lot of people don’t know the power of the platform.

We want to make sure every single partner, every employee, every contractor in the partner ecosystem as a whole knows how to tell the ServiceNow story from a platform architecture [angle], and how the workflows can be administered using that platform to transform business.

The offers we build, they can’t be like, ‘Let me show you the speeds and feeds of this feature.’

It has to be, ‘Let me show you how we can actually automate APO [accounts payable operations] or accounts receivable to take 50 percent of the work that humans are doing today into an automated state so you can take those people and put them on higher-value-added work streams.

It’s not like you’re going to take out all of the people. You’re going to reskill them.